How can you manage to run a horror campaign and make it legitimately

>>53471450
Horror games, like haunted houses, require a certain willingness on behalf of the scarees to play along. If your players aren't willing to meet you halfway, there's nothing you can do to pull them into it short of locking bomb collars around their throats and telling them that if they die in the game, they die in real life.

>>53471450

Play creepy ambient music!

>>53471450
>So how do you pull a horror game that legit scares your players shitless ?
It's pretty easy to make players scared for their character's lives, if they're invested in them. Make them roll perception checks, put them through difficult combats, have them fall through floors and twist ankles and break their hands in machinery. This requires the right group and mindset, though, and a session or two preluding the start of the horror. It's why horror movies can take half an hour to establish characters, to make us care about the people who are about to be hurt on the screen.

Actually scaring your players is more difficult, because everybody's scared by something different. But if your players don't even meet you halfway, you'll never have a chance.

It relies a lot on players that WANT to experience a horror story

I did a lot of cthulhu and one of my players would run away whenever it could become dangerous and or scary

I built a town where a campaign would take place and he LITERALLY WANTED TO LEAVE THE TOWN

This lead to ooc autism and them triggering me

Players need to be willing to participate otherwise the game doesnt work and u as a gm can't force the players to have fun which leads to dysfunctional parties and campaigns

In my example the ooc discussion and gm triggering led to me wiping the party and ending the campaign after the session

Now we're playing a purely social Vampire game.

>>53471653
Addendum

The cthulhu campaign we played after that one was more of a freeform campaign with horror elements

Something you HAVE to make sure is that your players have characters that force them to confront a scary situtation.

Sometimes you can also tell them ooc that if they dont go into a certain area they won't experience the awesome finale you have planned

I tried to mix horror and the world falling apart with the players genuinely winning in some situations

Give them small victories to keep them invested and show them a good time while scaring them as a sidething

Maybe during sidequests maybe in some conversations with beings out of time and space

Depends on your characters, the players and the setting

>>53471687
Another thing:

Always tell your players what their characters see, never tell them whats really going on. Drop hints sometimes but never ever tell them everything

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>>53471450
Know your players.
Scaring and horror have nothing to do with actual mechanics-you can force characters to make an hard Fear test, but this doesn't meant the players themselves are scared. Some people will tell you "use this system and not that one for horror!" , but that would only make your life easier when it comes to inflicting penalties on the characters. Scaring the players is all on you. As someone who regularly manages to make 2spooky4you games from dnd to rogue trader passing through all those weird horror indie games, I believe I found some neat tricks.
First, know the players. Each one of them has a switch or several that you need to hit in order to scare them. If you can not guess on your own, throw small spooky happenings at them and watch their reactions to see what gets a small raise out of them.
Make the players invested. You need to be an at least decent gm, otherwise no scaring is gonna happen. Make sure everyone is along for the ride. Mr Bones' ride.
Scare one to scare them all. If you managed to get the group invested in the game, as soon as one of them is scared for real, you can count on that player to spread paranoia on the others.
Set things out of reach. Players are used to deal with threats acrively, either by fighting or by planning. Make sure they can not deal with the source of fear: it must be kept just outside of their reach but always, watching and waiting. Audio clues work wonderfully- you can't do anything about them and you can use them to literally haunt the players

>>53471751
Pretty much this.

Also a lot is about OOC interaction at the table

Like when you're behing your screen rolling dice then ask them to make a perception check just grin a bit. Or when they want to open a door they know they have to open ask them if they really want to do that.
And after they open the door, maybe theres a danger maybe there isn't. Don't be prone to show your patterns, dont let them know whats happening, only allow glimpses

http://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/52291511/

I run horror in my games a lot and I always get my players spooked at least a little, and I run with like... 5 groups.

My secret ingredient is surreal horror mixed with carefully configured mystery. Make sure they don't quite know what's going on. Give them just enough explanation to move forward. It gets people invested just to make the pieces fit.

>>53471994
Give some examples pls

>>53472466
An example would be not describing the monster instead describing the reaction of the players

If theres a hounted house dont fuckin tell them its hounted but make things happen that indicate its hounted

>stuff keeps flying around and hitting the players
>piano keystrokes in the distance
>eventually a ghost appears
>oh shit theres another ghost
>ghosts cant be interacted with and disappear
>suddenly elevator doesn't work
>newspaper detail shit that went down in the house 10 years before
>oh shit run
>elevator is broken so now we have to take the stairs
>stairs lead to more spooks

Thats usually how it goes when u do horror in a way that spooks people